Category: Feature

The need to see the area being masked to ensure complete coverage and adhesion is paramount in ensuring that your conformal coating is masked correctly and does not creep under the masking tape. ET501G is not only the only commercially available ‘Silicone Free’ tape but is translucent allowing a clear view of what is masked and its full adhesion.

Elder supply ET501G as slit rolls or Dots and are able to convert to your required size’s in order to suit your every masking requirement.

The lack of need for masking is due to the coating thickness being so thin that there is no resistance to removing the material. This means the FC can coat all of the circuit including connectors and offer the protection of the coating.

However, this very fact means the FC coating is delicate to handle and may not provide the long term reliability needed like a traditional coating.

So, what if we could combine the two materials and have the properties of both?

The circuit board would have:

The long term protection due the traditional conformal coating

The hydrophobic nature due to the FC coating

Protection all across the circuit board

Nexus have been experimenting wth dual coating with both traditional conformal coatings and ultra-thin coatings.

A circuit board with both conformal coating and a fluoropolymer (FC) coating applied. The FC material in the connector repels the water droplet that would normally capillary into the component.

The results are extremely interesting for potentially increasing the protection of the circuit without adding a significant amount of cost to the process.

How do staff interaction with the production process and affect the results?

When considering staff we are talking about everyone involved in the process. That is operators, technicians, supervisors and process engineers. For staff then there are three key areas. These can be considered as training, operation and troubleshooting.

Nexus has highlighted six critical areas that affect coating production and reduce performance on the line. These are the machines, materials, staff, process control, upstream processes and customer requirements.

In a series of six articles over the next six weeks Nexus will attempt to highlight these six key areas for production and how the production line can be improved to achieve acceptable levels of defects.

This week Dr Lee Hitchens will consider the conformal coating material itself and how it affects the selective conformal coating production process.